On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 05:45:36PM +1100, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
> * Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña <jfs@computer.org> [2003-03-07 09:19]:
> > 1.- Do you think that translators, people involved in i18n, and
> > people involved in documentation-only work should be given
> > maintainer status even though they are not going to maintain
> > packages or infrastructure? How should the NM process be modified in
> > order to provide for this?
>
> This is a tough question. The problem is that once you're a
> developer, you can also upload packages and some translators or
> documentation people might not have the abilities for that. The easy
> solution to create a seperate keyring sound easy, but isn't when you
> think about it... it would introduce a tier-system in Debian in which
> some developers are more equal than others... it's not clear whether
> we want to go there.
One way of doing this would be to limit everyone equally. We could
modify the upload process so that all developers are allowed to upload
only their packages, and have some sort of check or delay or whatever
for doing NMUs. Alternatively, there could be 'groups' of package for
which additional uploaders can be admitted, because we know they have
the skill for it. This would have every developper at the same level,
and would need to get a sort of certification for uploading various kind
of packages (libraries, perl packages, security sensitive, base, etc.).
This would also pave the way for more cooperative maintenance of group
of packages or something such, an extension of co-maintainership if you
want.
As an example, i maintain the ocaml and related packages. There are
other maintainers working on packages based on ocaml, and if i need a
NMU of one of my packages, i will ask one of those to do it on the
debian-ocaml-maint mailing list, since i know they know about the
packages more than a random developper who has no idea what ocaml is
about.
Friendly,
Sven Luther